BYOD gets attention at Mobile World Congress

Helping IT shops deal with the security and management of consumer smartphones and tablets in the workplace will be a big theme at Mobile World Congress (MWC) this week.

Samsung and Red Bend Software jointly announced Monday that they will conduct enterprise trials of a dual-persona version of the Galaxy S III smartphone starting in the second quarter. Details of the trials weren’t available, but the dual persona Galaxy S III will be demonstrated at MWC.

The Galaxy will run two separate Android OSes—one for personal use, the other for business use. Red Bend relies on a type 1 mobile hypervisor that runs directly on top of the hardware, with each operating system completely isolated from the other.

BlackBerry recently announced two new smartphones—the Z10 and the Q10—that will also have work and personal data separated, but on a single version of the BlackBerry 10 OS. BlackBerry calls the dual-persona software Balance, and requires corporations to install BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 software on a firewall protected server to manage many of Balance’s features.

Red Bend and Samsung have worked together before, with Samsung using vRapid mobile for over-the-air updates as well as VDirect Mobile software for device management.

SAP also announced at MWC a Mobile Documents app for the iPad that’s based on an internal version of the app used by 10,000 of SAP’s 53,000 mobile users. When combined with SAP Afaria for mobile device management, SAP contends that businesses will have a complete system for securing mobile devices, apps and content.

The Mobile Documents app will give users a single point of access to files and file-sharing capability from any mobile device, SAP said. The app is expected to ship on March 15; pricing has not been announced. SAP said it expects companies to have access to a software development kit to embed file sharing into existing SAP back-office applications. An individual file-sync capability and a corporate shared-documents capability are also planned.

Also at MWC, Good Technology will demonstrate its mobile device encryption security embedded in an ARM-based mobile processor. Such an approach would minimize the risk of mobile security provided solely through software, Good officials said.